Overview

The Office of Justice Programs is a federal agency that provides federal leadership, grants, training, technical assistance and other resources to improve the nation’s capacity to prevent and reduce crime, assist victims and enhance the rule of law by strengthening the criminal and juvenile justice systems.

Supernova Award Category

Next Generation Customer Experience

The Problem

The Office of Justice Programs has been measuring its customer experience for years, using customer experience data to drive changes on individual websites. This was time-consuming and costly and the OJP wanted a more efficient, simplified way to manage its digital properties at scale. Beginning in 2019, the OJP set out to bring its more than 40 different web domains and digital assets into a single enterprise platform, with one public-facing website. To monitor and manage the new website -- which garners 14 million pageviews year to date and growing annually -- the department evolved its Voice of the Customer approach /digital experience initiative to focus on the enterprise. The goal was to leverage customer feedback in real-time to support a data-driven and results-oriented approach for continual improvement in customer experience, and to realize efficiencies in effort and cost, while also enhancing OJP’s responsiveness and agility in making improvements.

The Solution

When the OJP was looking to measure and quantify customer satisfaction in an accurate and precise way, it didn’t have to look far. More than 90 federal departments and agencies have standardized on this particular technology and methodology for website assessment and improvement and use of the corresponding federal benchmarks which are published each year. This allows the OJP to compare performance with other federal departments and agencies in addition to using the framework to prioritize improvements, working with limited time and resources.

Via a combination of technology, services and methodology, the OJP now receives actionable insights (based on the Voice of the Customer) to understand how its digital property is performing and how it can improve to meet the needs of customers and key stakeholders on a minute-by-minute basis.

This underscores its mission of continuous improvement by enabling data-driven changes at both a strategic and tactical level.

The results

The OJP instituted a comprehensive digital experience management program to collect and analyze data to quantify the customer experience and identify and quickly act on areas for improvement using a sophisticated analytics arsenal to measure the digital experience, aggregate digital feedback, and support continuous improvement initiatives. Tools, from surveys to replay videos to smart thank you pages to usability studies and more, are used in concert with the agency’s existing data infrastructure to accelerate the path from data collection to actionable intelligence to measurable improvement. The OJP now gains digital feedback to identify what needs to be improved quickly through real-time alerts. Using digital experience session replays, the team can download MP4 files of individual sessions and attach them to service tickets to provide developers with the necessary context to understand issues. This has unlocked visibility to enterprise opportunities leading to the improvement of millions of user experiences. Replay videos add vital visual context, providing instant clarity and extra insight. The beauty of leveraging replay on an enterprise platform is that a single video can reveal an opportunity with the power to yield exponential benefits. Via the session replay application, the OJP has improved user experience on mobile, corrected grant application guidelines, made tables more accessible, enhanced resource printing, and made navigation more intuitive.
 

Metrics

Leveraging Voice of the Customer feedback surveys and real-time email alert notifications, the OJP has improved the velocity of insights to action from 30 days to 3 minutes. The combination of these tools has empowered the organization to act on relevant comments so quickly that web pages can be improved before a user who provides feedback has left the site. Usability studies have led to a 284% improvement in content engagement, with 3 times as many users being able to successfully locate resources they were seeking. In addition to the immediacy of the data, OJP utilizes industry benchmarks and can compare performance with customer experience metrics within and among program offices and channels.

The Technology

In addition to OJP’s in-house tools, the Verint Experience Management Cloud collects and analyzes data to quantify customer experience and identify and quickly act on areas for improvement. Verint Feedback Surveys collect data when users are frustrated or have quick thoughts specific to a page; Verint Predictive Experience surveys provide more in-depth, longer-form insights, and session replays provide play-by-play views of user interactions paired with feedback data.

Disruptive Factor

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a historic pivot point for government’s digital transformation, vaulting government headfirst into the next stage of digitization, and underscoring just how far many government agencies still must go to become truly digital-first organizations. Per Deloitte, “Surges in demand for benefits often couldn’t be accommodated. Websites crashed. Call centers were overburdened. Telehealth and virtual learning were often slow to scale.” Statistics show government agencies were ill-prepared in the digital experience arena before the onset of the pandemic. In 2019, 80% of US federal agencies scored “poor” or “very poor” on Forrester’s US Federal Customer Experience Index, compared with only 14% of brands in the private sector.

The OJP’s digital experience initiative is a testament to how government can function effectively in a digital-first world. The “proper care and feeding” of the digital experience is quintessential and having a framework to gauge the success or failure of government digital experiences and prioritize digital experience improvement is paramount. The OJP’s ability to surface real-time digital feedback insights based on data variety, immediacy and synthesis, and take correction action quickly – effectively a “digital triage” effort – is a best-practice approach.

Shining Moment

Brian McGrath was named Public Sector CIO of the Year for the Capital Region, for his IT leadership of the U.S. Department of Justice/Office of Justice Programs and focus on digital dexterity and continuous improvement.